


Blake's Study Group: An Age Without Aura

by Kiiratam



Series: Blake's Study Group [3]
Category: RWBY
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, F/M, Fluff, Philosophy, Studying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-19
Updated: 2020-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:21:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23209195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiiratam/pseuds/Kiiratam
Summary: The time before the Great War was dangerous, not because of the Grimm, but because of other people. Most of whom didn't have active Auras. So why cover the period in an Aura Studies class? Blake has some answers.Takes place between Volumes 1 and 2. (My BMBLB fic index)
Relationships: Blake Belladonna/Yang Xiao Long, Jaune Arc/Pyrrha Nikos
Series: Blake's Study Group [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2097744
Comments: 17
Kudos: 57





	Blake's Study Group: An Age Without Aura

"So, what, everyone just forgot?" Jaune was giving his book a suspicious look, like it was to blame.

  
"Not exactly?" Blake realized that wasn't helpful, so she tried to explain. "That wasn't what happened, but it can seem like it was."

  
Nora rolled her eyes. "More lies to keep everyone calm?"

  
"It's complicated." And Blake was going to get into why, but-

  
"Sounds pretty simple to me." Nora polished an apple on her jacket and took a big bite.

  
Maybe Blake would actually be able to _explain_ something, now that Nora's mouth was busy. "We're covering a huge amount of material this week, across what would become all four Kingdoms and over a hundred years. But none of it is really _by_ people with Auras, _for_ people with Auras."

  
"Okay, but how do so many people just become convinced that Aura wasn't real?" And Jaune was still waiting for _his_ answer.

  
Blake had a sudden flash of sympathy for her teachers, who had to put up with twenty students, not two. "A lot of that was because of politics. The proto-Kingdoms had established standing armies, and there was a lot of demonization of Aura-users as outsiders, troublemakers, or just bandits."

  
Jaune nodded. "I mean, isn't the last one true? With all of those mercenary bands that decided to turn bandit?"

  
Mostly comprehensible through her mouthful of apple, Nora said, "They weren't getting paid. No pay, no food. The Kingdoms did that to themselves."

  
"Yeah, that makes sense. But why weren't they paid?" Jaune shuffled through his notes, looking for an answer. "I mean, having a bunch of Aura-users on your side is a _good_ thing in a fight. Or a war."

  
Blake actually had a good answer for that. "One of Mr. Kong's contemporaries had a saying, 'it is better to be on hand with ten men than absent with a thousand.' The bandits took a lot of upkeep, and they weren't reliable."

  
"What, all of them? Across all that space and time you mentioned?"

  
"How difficult is it to get RWBY and JNPR to agree on a movie?"

  
Jaune opened his mouth, thought for a moment, and closed it. "So the independence and initiative of small, elite bands was seen as a _downside_?"

  
Nora snorted. "In the _army_? Uh, yeah?"

  
Jaune seemed to accept that. "Okay. So, the not-quite-yet-Kingdoms had their armies to fight off the Grimm, and do patrols, and get taxes, and all that. What did they do about - I don't know, a Nevermore? Or a Deathstalker, or a Behemoth? How do ordinary people handle that?"

  
"How do they handle it now, when there aren't any Huntresses around?" Blake was trying to ask more questions, get Jaune and Nora to put themselves into the situation, use their knowledge, instead of just talking at them. That had been one of the recurring suggestions in the texts Yang's dad had recommended. 

  
"Um." He looked up at the ceiling, marshaling information from his discussions with Ruby. "Massed fire, defense of hardpoints, heavy weapons. Retreating."

  
Blake nodded. "That hasn't changed. They just have better weapons now."

  
Sucking in a breath over his teeth, Jaune looked back down at his notes. And back up at Blake, as a thought occurred to him. "And Semblances, if anyone has one. And that's _another_ thing! Semblances didn't go away either, and most of them need an active Aura. And I remember reading somewhere that discovering your Semblance can activate your Aura."

  
"Was it from M. Ana?" Blake vaguely remembered that passage from earlier in the year. Something about your Semblance being a distillation of yourself, and it was only through the vessel of Aura that it could actually be poured and imbibed.

  
"Yeah, that sounds right."

  
Nora shrugged. "So they have a power they don't really understand, and no one to talk to about it. That kind of fear and doubt isn't going to help anyone's Aura. Maybe it takes a hit or two for them, and they dismiss the visual effects as a hallucination or something, because _they're_ a good soldier, not a bandit or a foreigner or anything."

  
"Exactly, Nora." Positive reinforcement had been another suggestion from Blake's reading. "The nascent Kingdoms knew they couldn't actually fight Aura-users, so they did everything they could to win without fighting. Turning the culture against them, declaring them outlaw, seizing the assets of actual formal organizations like the Auric Order. And, within a generation or two, you had historians going over old records, and because of their biases, they looked at events like Cortana at Cyrotor, and decided that it was all 'poetic license.'"

  
"But-" Jaune had an extremely skeptical look on his face. "-it happened? I mean, we've done excavations of the battlesite, and the damage to her swords match the cuts in the stones there, and-"

  
Blake held up a hand. "We do _now_. But archaeology was new then, and there were a lot of bad assumptions being made. Among them, that the modern day was a pinnacle, and that people in the past were primitive, superstitious, and just generally not very smart or well educated."

  
"But what about the bandits?" Nora swallowed, and went on. "I mean, _they've_ still got their tradition of Aura-use going, and who's going to stop them? Hey, anyone else want an apple?" She pulled a couple more out of her bag.

  
Jaune held out his hand. "Sure." Nora passed him one.

  
Blake waved her off. "But the bandit clans are living on the edge of civilization, with scarce resources. They had to focus on survival, not improving their Aura. And they're badly outnumbered, so they have to pick their battles." She pushed away memories.

  
"I mean, that'll stop most people." Nora got up to toss her core away. "What about the weird ones, who manage to get a strong Aura despite all that?"

  
"It's not that Aura-users disappeared, Nora. They just stopped being as public as they'd been. So the Mistral Xia Ministry was closed, but the Kingdom of Mistral had secret police who were absolutely Aura-users. Families passed down Aura traditions - the Schnees, for one. Jaune, your grandfather may have been another one."

  
Jaune swallowed before answering. "Maybe? I mean, I have his weapons, and they're not standard issue, but he could have just been friends with a weaponsmith. I don't have any secret family Aura traditions."

  
Nora dunked her apple core into the trash can. "Maybe not, but you _are_ kinda old fashioned. Kind of like Pyrrha, with the shield and the armor and everything." Nora glanced at Jaune, who was shuffling through his notes, and winked at Blake.

  
_So Nora's trying to get her team-mates together? Am I supposed to help?_

  
_It **is** a pretty classic romantic set-up._

  
_It's real life, though, not a book._

  
_But Nora seems to have a pretty good feel for this? And I have seen Pyrrha throw some pretty sappy looks Jaune's way when he wasn't looking._

  
"That's a good transition, Nora. Jaune, you know how you and Pyrrha can lock shields and work together really well? The Kingdoms wanted that sort of thing, but they also wanted obedient soldiers."

  
Nora chimed in. "Which is why Atlas is big into robots."

  
"Jumping ahead, again, Nora."

  
"Sorry." Nora flopped back down into her chair.

  
Blake tried to push through her amazement at Nora apologizing, and tried to get to her point. "One of the developments to come out of this was partial Aura unlocks. So you'd join the army, and they'd give you your weapons, armor, and get you blessed by a priest, or examined by a doctor, or some smokescreen that they'd use to let just a little bit of your Aura out."

  
"Oh, right!" Jaune found the relevant portion of his notes. "Um, the analogue Glynda used was a balloon with a slow leak. So it's not you using your soul to protect yourself, it's more like you're losing a piece of yourself."

  
" _Super_ ethical." Nora was right about that.

  
"And," Blake added, "They could turn it off again. Which was really important to the people in power, so they could stay in control."

  
Jaune shook his head. "Authority sucks."

  
Yang poked her head into the study room. "You're singing my song! Who are we complaining about?" She came over to lean on the table.

  
Pulling out another apple, Nora offered it to Yang. "Pre-Great War leaders."

  
Taking it, Yang took a bite. "Can't believe Weiss doesn't eat these. And yeah, they sucked. I mean, the king of Vale wasn't the worst, but - I mean, if he'd shown off his awesome Aura powers earlier, the war could have ended a lot sooner."

  
"I don't know about that, Yang. Even with Aura, he was only one person. History isn't changed by one person, unless the situation is _very_ precarious." Which, Blake told herself, was why collective action was so important. "The Last Battle was one of those times, obviously, and he _still_ realized that he needed more people, which is why he founded the Academies."

  
Yang pulled up a chair, straddling it as she sat next to Blake. "Good point."

  
"And then everyone just remembered, 'oh yeah, we can unlock superpowers?'" Jaune waved his apple around. "I still don't get how it got pushed to the back of everyone's minds!"

  
Yang shrugged. "Social pressures. There's still the undercurrent of 'if you have an Aura, you have to fight the Grimm' running though societies, along with 'if you have an Aura, you're a bad person', and it's a lot easier to just not try to reconcile that and, I dunno, go farm, or write scandalous poetry, or do something to earn some lien. And a **lot** of the early applicants for Huntress licenses didn't have Academy training at all, so it really didn't vanish, despite all that."

  
He shook his head. "It just doesn't make sense. All the pieces make sense, but they just don't add up."

  
"Part of it is the culture we were raised in." Blake thought she could help Jaune over this particular hurdle. "Remember how old historians thought Cortana at Cyrotor was just literary exaggeration? That was because their culture was telling them that sort of thing didn't happen in real life. It was aspirational, maybe, but not realistic. Our modern culture says Huntresses are heroic, and important, and that everyone else - no matter what they're doing - is helping to support them. We're all working as a team, from RWBY and JNPR, all the way up to the Four Kingdoms."

  
Jaune looked down at his notes again. "Yeah, and their culture was all about group action, under proven leadership, and divine right, and all the other excuses they came up with to justify autocrats bossing everyone else around. 'The many directed by the one.' I think I get it. Maybe."

  
"Hey, Blake?" Nora was tossing an apple back and forth between her hands. "We keep kinda dancing around a point. What about people who have active Auras and _don't_ want to help? Like bandits, and rogue Huntresses, and, um, other people?" She glanced up at Blake's 'bow.' "Some of them have really strong Auras, but they don't do the same stuff we do. How does that work?"

  
_Breathe in, hold it, breathe out._

  
Blake felt Yang press her leg against Blake's, under the table.

  
With her anchors, Blake managed to get an answer out. "Some of it is older techniques, like Mr. Kong's. Lots of meditation, mental focusing, all things that require time, but no other resources. And there have been theories about some other methods."

  
Nora nodded, set her apple on the table. "Like what?"

  
"I haven't seen any studies about this yet, but the theory is that devotion to a cause can serve as a, um-" Blake tried to pull herself away from specific details, and into the theoretical. "Instead of your Aura reflecting your soul, you're stepping out of the way entirely, and letting the cause - whatever it is - power your Aura."

  
"So like, if someone thinks Atlas is the greatest place on Remnant, and they really _believe_ that, it can make their Aura stronger?" Nora had a disgusted look on her face. "How is _that_ right?"

  
_It wasn't._

  
Yang chipped in. "If Blake read the same thing I did, the authors made a point that the True Believer wasn't _really_ getting empowered by their cause, just their belief in it. So instead of focusing all of themselves into their Aura, they're just focusing one specific part. Which isn't really a part of themselves. So if they have a crisis of faith, their Aura control slips. Unlike us, where even if we're hurting mentally, we're still us."

  
Blake nodded. And didn't add that the real fanatics could justify anything to themselves, even into the deepest hypocrisy.

  
Jaune's scroll beeped at him. "Oh, right, we should get to practice." He started stuffing his notes away. "Doesn't RWBY have practice too?"

  
Yang shook her head. "Weiss and Ruby are at a lecture about Dust refining, so we got the night off."

  
"Well, um, we were going to 3v1 Pyrrha tonight." Jaune had a hopeful look on his face. "If it's 5v1, we might actually be able to win."

  
Snorting, Nora took a bite of her apple. "Don't count on it."

  
Yang leaned over and bumped Blake with her shoulder. "What do you think?"

  
Blake shrugged. Her only evening plans had been reading and homework. "Sure."

  
Smiling broadly, Jaune said, "Great! Okay, so, I want you two to launch a sneak attack when the rest of us are already engaged. Do whatever teamwork magic Ruby has shown you. We'll try to set Pyrrha up."

  
Groaning, Nora said, "This is one of those plans that has me tanking hits, doesn't it?"

  
"I'm going to be right next to you, Nora."

  
"Until Pyrrha sends you flying."

  
Yang laughed. "C'mon, guys! It'll be fun!"

  
Blake wasn't sure about _fun_ , but it would definitely be a learning experience.


End file.
